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Lots of great stuff at the AFI Fest in Hollywood this weekend. I’ve only seen a handful of the movies, but if they’re any indication . . .

EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY: This literally hothouse Romanian family drama builds disturbing and persuasive tension as a divorced father loses control at his ex-wife’s apartment when he comes to take their five-year-old daughter to the beach. Shot in real time in the cramped, lived-in location, it’s a fantastic showcase for the actors and director of photography Andrei Butica’s choreographic skills, as well as being a marvel of ever-ratcheting suspense and psycho/emotional credibility. Plays 11/2 at 4 p.m. and 11/6 at 1:45.

A HIJACKING: Cutting between a captured freighter in the Indian Ocean and its owners’ corporate headquarters in Copenhagen, Tobias Lindholm’s smart and sensitive thriller looks at high seas piracy from a variety of angles – except, maybe, as much from the Somali pirates’ p.o.v. as it could have. That noted, the strategizing and maneuvering – between both captors and captives and the African extortionists and European corporate suits – is gnarly, absorbing stuff, and no one comes out of it quite as we might expect. Plays 11/2 at 4:30 and 11/5 at 10 p.m.

PIETA: Just when you thought South Korean crime films couldn’t get any sicker, Kim (3-Iron) Ki-duk’s latest rises/descends to levels of imaginative perversity that are truly jaw-dropping. Lee Jung-Jin is a heartless loan shark enforcer who goes around crippling deadbeats until an elegant older woman (Cho Min-Soo) insistently insinuates herself into his sordid life, claiming that she’s the lost mother who abandoned him at birth. He demands the most debasing proof that she’s who she is and sincere about returning to love him. She . . . well, I really shouldn’t say, but man, this is one cold-hearted movie. Not as Hitchcokianly elegant as Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, the Cadillac of this weird Korean subgenre, Pieta is nonetheless plotted very well and tightly, and staged with an effective discretion that makes it feel a lot less gross than it really is. Until you think about it, anyway. In case you’re uncertain, I highly recommend it. Plays 11/2 at 6:45, and on 11/4 at 1 and 10 p.m.

WAR WITCH: Though it’s narrative grows a little fuzzy at times, this Canadian/Congolese production does a fine job of humanizing a situation we can barely comprehend: The fate of a female African child soldier. Rachel Mwanza deservedly won the Berlin Film Festival’s best actress award for playing pubescent Komona – forced to shoot her parents at 12, raped and impregnated by her rebel commander at 14 and gifted with the power to foresee the path of battles when she drinks hallucinogenic tree sap. Harrowing is the word, but the girl’s often deadpan perseverance should inspire more than a few. Playing 11/4 at 3:45 and 11/6 at 1:45.

Not sure it adds up to much, but the calculating that went into “Cloud Atlas” is fantastic.

Six different stories, all told in different times and places with the same actors playing different characters (and, sometimes, different genders and races, too), directed by two Wachowskis and a Tykwer. Should be a mess, and it kind of is if you’re expecting something seriously deep to be said about transformation or freedom or creativity or man’s in/humanity . . .

But there is astounding formal continuity here, even between a 19th Century ocean crossing and a future, Soylent Green Seoul. And as this long, involved but not quite as involving as it wants to be mega-production rolls along, it builds up a montagenal steam of monumental proportions. Cuts between the narratives pivot increasingly adroitly on thematic, dialogue and movement-within-the-frame points. Alexander Berner’s editing team orchestrates a true sensory symphony, compared by many to Griffith’s “Intolerance” but actually the kind of stuff the later, greater Soviet splicers might even have been wowed by.

It was enough for me. And I liked Cockney Tom Hanks throwing the guy off the balcony.

Here’s a relationship tip every guy should know: When a gun’s pointed at you, don’t hesitate a second to get between the barrel and your girlfriend’s head.

Writer-director Julia Loktev’s ravishing new feature “The Loneliest Planet” is primarily – overwhelmingly, really – about a Western couple getting swallowed up by the landscape on a hiking trip through the wild hills of formerly Soviet Georgia. Little is said and much is seen as the happy pair (Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal) enjoy nature, each other’s natural attributes and the earthy, awkward musings of their guide, a local guy with long-festering romantic disappointments (Bidzina Gujabidze).

An incident or two, though, seems to throw the lovebirds’ self-satisfied, alt.tourist worldview out of whack, and Loktev and her actors find just the right balance of passivity and aggressiveness to say volumes about their upended emotions without, again, relying on overt discussion. Usually, a movie with this much scenic beauty fails to show us much that really tells its story, but “Loneliest Planet” is as cinematic as travelogue filmmaking gets.

The 2011 L.A. Film Festival was, among other things, a feast of fine
acting. Yes, it may have started with a “Green Lantern” screening and
concluded with the so-so horror entry “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.”
But in between, practically every movie that I saw, whether fair to
fantastic overall, was enhanced by outstanding performances.
And isn’t that, essentially, one of the best things a successful
festival can hope for?
“Drive” was one of the festival’s higher-profile indies. Nicolas
Windig Refn won the directing award at Cannes earlier this year, and
this slickly cool study in gradually escalating brutality sure has
style to burn. It’s also deeply ridiculous, but Ryan Gosling’s
portrayal of a movie stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for
L.A. criminals counterbalances even the nuttiest moments. Through the first
half of the film, Gosling’s in the imperturbable Buddha mode he perfected
for “Half-Nelson.” As The Driver’s situation goes steadily south in
the stretch, however, cracks appear in his “Le Samourai” facade. They then become fissures. It’s a marvel of pitch control as impressive as the
protagonist’s driving skills, in a movie that misuses some other
prime talent (Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston) – although Albert
Brooks’ turn as a film producer gone to the dark side [insert your
own oxymoron joke here] is a total gas.
“Tyrannosaur” is almost an unintentional a parody of British miserablism movies, but its ensemble’s powerful commitment to horrid behavior makes it a sterling example instead. Scottish actor Peter Mullan plays a widower so filled with rage, he drunkenly kicks his own dog to death in the first few scenes. He’s moved to
some kind of tenderness, though, after meeting a religious woman (Olivia
Colman) whose husband (master wretch Eddie Marsan, the seething
driving instructor from Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky”) makes Mullan’s
character look like St. Francis. It’s the feature writing and directing
debut of actor,Paddy Considine, who can currently be seen in an
altogether lighter Brit film, the winsome coming-of-age comedy
“Submarine.” He makes sure “Tyrannosaur” showcases his colleagues’
full range of skills and depths of sensitivity, and by doing so makes
“Tyrannosaur’s” grim goings-on altogether exhilarating.
“How to Cheat” won LAFF’s best performance award for its
principles, Kent Osborne, Amanda Street and writer-director Amber
Sealey. Well-earned and pretty good for an initially insufferable,
micro-budget indie about a Silver Lake couple whose marriage has
become strained by their failure to have a baby. Though mostly told
from the mopey husband’s point of view, the narrative gets happily
hijacked by the unpredictable behavior of his mistress (Street) and
wife (Sealey) as his awkward foray into infidelity leads to surprising and not always convincing, but often enough emotionally breathtaking, behavior.
The French “Tomboy” is another oddball drama made special by
outstanding playacting. In this case, it’s two children – barely
tween Zoe Heran and the much younger Malonn Levana – who create an
astonishing psychological jungle gym to skitter upon. When their family moves to a
leafy southern town one summer, Heran’s shorthaired Laure takes the opportunity to
introduce herself as a boy so she can horse around with the rambunctious
local fellas. As Laure’s deception grows, and grows more perilous, her
adorable and adoring little sister Jeanne (Levana) gets giddily roped
into the game. “Tomboy” may not make a universal statement about
childhood, but it’s good at showing kids having fun in ways parents
can’t begin to imagine.
“The Destiny of Lesser Animals” works a wholly different but equally neat neat deception. On the surface, it’s the story of a Ghanaian cop, desperate to return to the
New York from whence he was deported, on the trail of a thief who
stole his crucial fake passport. As the story unfolds, however, the
film becomes nothing less than a dialectical examination of
post-colonial Africa’s unfulfilled promise. Yao B. Nunoo affectingly
charts the detective’s growing understanding that getting the hell
out of there may not be the best the thing he can do for his country
or himself.
Are you ready for Iraqsploitation? Or is that Iraxploitation?
Whichever, it’s coming next week a theater near you, and it’s called “The
Devil’s Double.” The kinda true story of an army veteran
who’s forced to serve as Saddam’s psycho son, Uday Hussein’s, lookalike
decoy, this slick Lee Tamahori film does not skimp on the decadence
and violence. By the time Uday’s sixth or seventh, apparently nightly
orgy ends inevitably ends in gunfire, even the most id-driven
filmgoers will probably have had their fill, and there’ll still be a
lot more to go. The thing is most surely redeemed, though, by Dominic
Cooper’s twin turn as the maniac princeling and his fundamentally
decent doppelganger – and by the fact that, although the movie’s
leads are English and French (Ludivine Sagnier is the Uday consort
who prefers the Double’s company), it provides a dozen decent roles
for Arab actors.
Speaking of Sagnier, she’s the best thing about “Love Crime,” a
French corporate thriller that otherwise unengagingly turns into a
perfect murder scenario. Sagnier is a smart but passive assistant to
the amoral head (Kristin Scott Thomas, having a wicked good time) of
a big multinational’s Paris office. As the boss exploits and
manipulates her to the breaking point, Sagnier employs all her actorly skills to show us her character has learned well. Too bad the lessons in the late Alain Corneau’s
final feature aren’t nearly as intriguing as they ought to be.
I’m not sure acting is “The Yellow Sea’s” strongest point, but I will
praise the cast of this insane Korean crime thriller for its
collective stamina. The convoluted tale of an ethnic Korean from
Manchuria, in Seoul to fulfill a hit contract and hunt for his
long-gone wife, Na Hong-jin’s lengthy thriller has so many chases,
fights and brutal encounters, you marvel that anyone is still
ambulatory, like, an hour before the end, let alone by the film’s extended set of ghastly climaxes. Over-the-top by even South Korea’s extreme standards,
this is hardly the artful kind of mayhem we associate with the work
of Park Chan-wook and other masters of this impressive national
cinema. But it does fulfill its bloody promise in an exhaustively
satisfying way.
Miranda July is a filmmaker/actor about whose gifts many find
dubious. “The Future,” follow-up to her funky quirkfest “Me and You
and Everyone We Know,” makes “How to Cheat” seem like a work of
Shakespearean rigor – initially, anyway. She and Hamish Linklater
play a couple of particularly mumbly Silver/Echo/E-Holly slackers who
use their impending adoption of an injured cat (that talks!) as an
excuse to behave even more irresponsibly. But as she pursues an
extra-cohabital affair and he perfects his ability to stop time (!),
these immature whiners’ souls become rich and poignantly exposed. As
for the cat . . . well, it’s worth seeing for yourself when the movie
opens commercially next week.
This weekend, though, you’ll want to rush out to any theater playing
“Another Earth.” The LAFF (and Sundance) darling was picked up for
distribution by Fox Searchlight; it’s a redemption tale so lovely and
touching that releasing it through one of his divisions could
actually lends Rupert Murdoch a bit of much-needed absolution.
As a parallel world is discovered moving closer to our own planet, a
young astronomy nerd (co-writer Brit Marling) and a traumatized composer (William Mapother) enter each other’s damaged orbits. Mike Cahill’s film could be your standard relationship indie if not for the expertly deployed sci fi metaphor, a perfectly disorienting electronic score by Fall on Your Sword – and two of the most compelling performances of the year.
I also thought “Another Earth” had the best final shot of any movie this year until, on the last day of the festival, I saw “Higher Ground.” Actress Vera Farmiga’s directing debut may not be the most visually arresting piece, but much like an Ozu film, its
unfussy form focuses us on the characters’ issues and relationships
in an unusually immersive way. Based on Carolyn Briggs’ memoir about
her journey through fundamentalist Christianity during the latter
third of the 20th Century, “Ground” is a marvel of exquisite tone
control. Helmer/star Farmiga expertly sidesteps multiple
opportunities to emotionally vulgarize the material, subtly and with
thorough conviction keeping the focus on one woman’s crisis of faith
through to that very last shot, an image so powerful and true it
brought me to tears for the first time in a theater since – oh, I
don’t know, “Sophie’s Choice”?
That may not have been a conventionally celebratory way to end
something called a festival, but I daresay nothing could have been better.
“Higher Ground” is scheduled for commercial release in late August.

Fans of medieval mayhem should have a field day at “Ironclad.” There’s hacking and torture aplenty; the low-budget, high-production value effort even built its own trebuchet, the first one of the ancient catapults manufactured, they say, since they went out of service sometime around the War of the Roses.
History buffs will likely also be engaged by this little-known slice of 13th Century politics. Not thrilled at having been forced to sign the Magna Carta, King John (Paul Giamatti, having frothing-at-the-mouth fun) leads a legion of Danish mercenaries against the barons who imposed the document. Main action takes place in and around the siege of Rochester Castle, where a handful of anti-royalist holdouts fight to delay the king’s forces until a French army can land and catch up.
“Ironclad” is hardly a perfect film. Whenever a big action scene starts, director Jonathan English goes all step-printed quick-cut, which is annoying and ugly. The hothouse romance between the lady of the manor (Kate Mara) and a celibate Knight Templar (James Purefoy) gets pretty campy pretty quick. But the film nicely captures the confused feudal loyalties and conflicting self-interests that somehow enabled the first baby steps of Western democracy. Like that eventuality, “Ironclad” is a good thing, despite its flaws.

For awhile there, The Names of Love’s agenda seems to be all about getting a French girl out of her clothes. Actress Sara Forestier is so adorable, that’s amusing for awhile, but just when you’re ready to ask how much director Michel Leclerc thinks he can get
away with, this sophisticated sex farce evolves into a rich and moving treatise on what it’s meant to be French for the last 75 years.
As Forestier’s half-North African Bahia takes political commitment to an unusual degree – she seduces right wingers of various stripes in a harebrained effort to convert them to her more liberal views – Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), the older, half-Jewish
scientist who’s the closest thing to her real boyfriend, comes to terms with a lifetime’s worth of avoided epiphanies.
Every skeleton in the collective Gallic closet – Nazi collaboration, the Algerian and Vietnamese debacles, cultural revolutions and their failure, the place that that whole “thank heaven for little girls” attitude comes from -and much more gets addressed and woven into the very real growth the odd couple undergoes. The political is made personal, and how, often via high risk narrative and cinematic tricks that succeed
beyond any reasonable exppectations.
Bahia’s anti-racist screwing around hits an ironic wall when she targets a radical Muslim, Arthur figures out a way to combat the memory of the Holocaust with whipped
cream. I already hear some people screaming about how inappropriate and offensive the whole thing sounds. But history and human nature are nothing if not inappropriate and offensive, and Leclerc celebrates the goodness (or, at least, the naked joy) we can all get out of life anyway.

Another thing to hate about actors: They eat better than you do.
Monday at her restaurant Lucques on Melrose,chef Suzanne Goin displayed the dishes she plans to serve some 1250 hungry thesps at Sunday’s Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony.
Gorin is a very nice lady, and I’m not just saying that because she didn’t just let journalists look at the food, she let us taste it.
Go ahead and hate me, too. I don’t care, I’m full.
So, without further ado, here’s what you’ll be missing Sunday:

A salad of blood oranges, dates and arugula

Beluga lentils with carrots, pinenuts and feta cheese. I don’t know if beluga actually makes lentils or if that means caviar is in the mix. I’m guessing the latter, since after some rather bland initial bites, the stuff explodes with delicate flavor in the back of your mouth.

Slow-roasted king salmon with cucumbers, yogurt and ginger-mint chutney. I wonder what people who like salmon will make of this, since this guy who’s never been a fan of the fish thought it was nirvanalicious.

I asked Goin, who’s catering her second SAG Awards this year, what it takes to keep 1200+ egomaniacs – most of whom will NOT be winning any award this weekend – full (if not, God forbid, fat) and happy.

“We just try to make the food like we make it at the restaurant,” she said. “We try to make little versions of really tasty, locally sourced food. Everything’s room temperature, so I work with a lot of bright, full flavors like olives, salsa verde, herbs and capers. I tried to think of four little dishes that work together but also sort of sing individually, to have a nice balance that, hopefully, they will eat and appreciate.”

While no actors were moved to sing about the food at last year’s awards, none had their managers or agents call to complain about it afterward, either. Good news for both viewers at home and attendees, when you think about it.

You may think recovering addict movies are all pretty much the same. But there’s something in the latest from Denmark, “Applause,” that makes a real difference. Call it compassion, or behavioral pragmatism in the face of melodramatic potential; however it’s labeled, it makes this one of the most persuasuve movies about alcoholism and its shaky aftermath ever made.
Throwing vanity to the wind, Paprika Steen opts to let her character Thea’s every jittery move, tentative act and desperate insistence that she’s “OK now” tell the story, while first-time feature director Martin Pieter Zandvliet undercuts every opportunity for a bad situation to turn disastrous.
Thea is a pretty good stage actress, drunk or sober, and her sad but determined attempts to stay on the wagon and reconnect with her two young, alienated sons are interspersed with scenes of her performing that ultimate boozy gripe session, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
At her real-world worst, Thea hurls Albee-esque insults at her ex-husband, who along with his new, psychologist wife is cautiously agreeable to integrating the mother back into the lives of her children. But “Woolf’s” bitterness does not key “Applause’s” tone. Neither does the film go too far into the grinding angst of Zandvliet’s most obvious influences, Bergman and Cassavetes (critical comparisons of Steen to Gena Rowlands in “Opening Night” are easy but not really accurate).
Rather, this movie admires the effort of an often difficult woman to honestly make a go of it one day at a time. It acknowledges her mistakes and, in persistent raw close-up, her fading physical and spiritual beauty. But it also knows she’s capable of some limits, shreds of self-control, and that in her particular life these can be quite gorgeous things.
In its realistic, unpretentious way, “Applause” is kind of gorgeous, too.

As usual, filmmakers and movie reviewers enjoyed an edgy but good-humored detente at the 36th Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards dinner in Century City Saturday night.
“For all the bruises and scrapes and abrasions that have landed upon me over the years – and I’ve probably gotten fewer than I deserved – when critics really love actors, we really, really love you,” noted “The King’s Speech’s” Colin Firth, the group’s best actor designee.
“I have to say, this feels much better,” Firth could not help but add.
The packed event in the InterContinental Hotel’s ballroom got off to a rousing start with musical performances by Jackie DeShannon and Kris Kristofferson, two acts associated with LAFCA’s 2010 career achievement award winner, Paul Mazursky (DeShannon’s rendition of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” was used memorably in the director’s first feature, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”; Kristofferson acted in “Blume in Love”).
“This is an historic moment for me,” Mazursky’s longtime pal Mel Brooks, who helped present the award, revealed. “I’ve never eaten with a film critic!”
Mazursky himself recounted the mood swings he’d undergo back in the 1970s and ’80s heyday of serious film criticism, when the depression of a negative notice in The New York Times could only be counteracted by a supportive phone call from The New Yorker’s legendary Pauline Kael.
But the 80-year-old auteur of such humanist classics as “Harry and Tonto,” “An Unmarried Woman” and “Enemies: A Love Story” concluded his richly anecdotal acceptance speech with an outcry against a current corruption of film criticism that both artists and those who write about their work equally find appalling.
“Two great Iranian directors have been jailed for six years and ordered not to make movies for 20 years,” Mazursky said, referring to Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof, to whom the 2010 LAFCA awards were dedicated. “We’re trying to get a demonstration together at the United Nations to get them out of jail. I hope you all can do something about it, and thank you very much.”
The night’s big winner, as it has been throughout this event-packed awards season (of which LAFCA remains one of the few programs dedicated to the art of cinema as opposed to celebrity-fawning and buzz-generating), was “The Social Network.” It shared best director (David Fincher) and Music Score with, respectively, “Carlos'” Olivier Assayas (the former French film critic also accepted the best foreign language film prize on “Carlos'” behalf) and “The Ghost Writer.”
Screenplay winner Aaron Sorkin delivered one of the night’s least-jokey tributes to the reviewing community in his acceptance speech.
“I’ve read over the last three years that the impact of film critics has been diminishing,” Sorkin said. “I think that everybody who made ‘The Social Network’ strongly disagrees with that. Film critics were the first ones to see the movie. They liked it and told people to see the movie, and they did. They then told their friends to see the movie and that made it, that’s the way it all worked. We are very, very grateful for that.”
Before taking the best picture plaque, notoriously competitive “Social Network” producer Scott Rudin admitted that, when it comes to appreciating good film work, there are really no good reasons for either contention or contests.
“It’s hard to sit in a room with all of this talent and believe that only one thing can be ‘the best’,” Rudin observed. “Everybody in this room deserves huge acknowledgement for what they’ve done here.”